Tonsawang, also known as Tombatu, is an
Austronesian language of the northern tip of
Sulawesi
Sulawesi (), also known as Celebes (), is an island in Indonesia. One of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and the world's eleventh-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Mindanao and the Sulu ...
, Indonesia. It belongs to the
Minahasan
The Minahasans (alternative spelling: Minahassa) are an ethnic group native to the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia, formerly known as North Celebes. The Minahasa people sometimes refer to themselves as Manado people. Although the Minahasan p ...
branch of the
Philippine languages
The Philippine languages or Philippinic are a proposed group by R. David Paul Zorc (1986) and Robert Blust (1991; 2005; 2019) that include all the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi, Indonesia—except Sama–Bajaw (language ...
.
Location
According to linguist
James Sneddon, the language is "one of the most isolated languages", spoken in southeast Minahasa, while linguist
Robert Blust
Robert A. Blust (; ; May 9, 1940 – January 5, 2022) was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blu ...
situated it, along with the others of the Minahasan group, near
Lake Tondano
Lake Tondano is the largest lake in North Sulawesi, Indonesia.
The lake is approximately from the city of Manado and is above sea level.
In recent years there have been reports of decreasing water levels at Lake Tondano; from 1934 when it was , ...
, "in the nothern peninsula of Sulawesi".
Orthography
Alphabet
* a –
* b –
* e –
* è –
* g –
* i –
* j –
* k –
* l –
* m –
* n –
* ng –
* o –
* p –
* r –
* s –
* t –
* u –
* w –
* ' –
[Sneddon, James N. ''Proto-Minahasan: phonology, morphology, and wordlist''. Canberra: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1978. pp. 5, 54-57.]
References
Further reading
* Brickell, Timothy C. (2018). "Tonsawang (Toundanow), North Sulawesi, Indonesia — Language Contexts". In:
Peter K. Austin (ed.). ''Language Documentation and Description'', vol 16. London: EL Publishing. pp. 55-85. .
* Brickell, Timothy C. (2020). "Language contact in North Sulawesi: Preliminary observations". In: Thomas J. Conners and Atsuko Utsumi, eds. ''Aspects of regional varieties of Malay''. NUSA 68: 159–190. Permanent URL: http://repository.tufs.ac.jp/handle/94893; doi: https://doi.org/10.15026/94893
* Matu, Tania.
Bentuk Permintaan Sopan dalam Bahasa Inggris dan Bahasa Tonsawang: Suatu Analisis Kontrastif. In: ''Jurnal Elektronik Fakultas Sastra
Universitas Sam Ratulangi'' Vol 1, No 3 (2018). (Abstract in English).
* Rorong, Ferdy Dj; Lensun, Sherly; Sompotan, Amelia Gladys; Pandi, Helena; Sambeka; Fince Leny; Aror, Susanti. "Tonsawang Language Speech Acts in Traditional Medicine". In: ''Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Social Sciences (ICSS 2018)''. Atlantis Press, 2018. pp. 903-907. . DOI: https://doi.org/10.2991/icss-18.2018.187.
* Utsumi, Atsuko (2018). ''The Tonsawang language’s basic morphology and syntactic features''. Paper presented at The Fourteenth International Conference of Austronesian Linguistics (14-ICAL). July 17-20. Antananarivo: Universitè di Antananarivo.
External links
* ELAR collection
Tonsawang: a collaborative multimedia project documenting an endangered language of North Sulawesideposited by Timothy Brickell
Languages of Sulawesi
Minahasan languages
{{philippine-lang-stub